One of the most attractive bits of green and wooded country
near London I know lies between Reading and Basingstoke and
includes Aldermaston with its immemorial oaks in Berkshire and
Silchester with Pamber Forest in Hampshire. It has long been
one of my favourite haunts, summer and winter, and it is
perhaps the only wooded place in England where I have a home
feeling as strong as that which I experience in certain places
among the South Wiltshire downs and in the absolutely flat
country on the Severn, in Somerset, and the flat country in
Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, especially at Lynn and about
Ely.
I am now going back to my first visit to this green retreat;
it was in the course of one of those Easter walks I have
spoken of, and the way was through Reading and by Three Mile
Cross and Swallowfield. On this occasion I conceived a
dislike to Reading which I have never quite got over, for it
seemed an unconscionably big place for two slow pedestrians to
leave behind. Worse still, when we did leave it we found that
Reading would not leave us. It was like a stupendous octopus
in red brick which threw out red tentacles, miles and miles
long in various directions - little rows and single and double
cottages and villas, all in red, red brick and its weary
accompaniment, the everlasting hard slate roof. These square
red brick boxes with sloping slate tops are built as close as
possible to the public road, so that the passer-by looking in
at the windows may see the whole interior - wall-papers,
pictures, furniture, and oftentimes the dull expressionless
face of the woman of the house, staring back at you out of her
shallow blue eyes. The weather too was against us; a grey
hard sky, like the slate roofs, and a cold strong east wind to
make the road dusty all day long.
Arrived at Three Mile Cross, it was no surprise to find it no
longer recognizable as the hamlet described in Our Village,
but it was saddening to look at the cottage in which Mary
Russell Mitford lived and was on the whole very happy with her
flowers and work for thirty years of her life, in its present
degraded state. It has a sign now and calls itself the
"Mitford Arms" and a "Temperance Hotel," and we were told that
you could get tea and bread and butter there but nothing else.
The cottage has been much altered since Miss Mitford's time,
and the open space once occupied by the beloved garden is now
filled with buildings, including a corrugated-iron dissenting
chapel.
From Three Mile Cross we walked on to Swallowfield, still by
those never-ending roadside red-brick cottages and villas, for
we were not yet properly out of the hated biscuit metropolis.
It was a big village with the houses scattered far and wide
over several square miles of country, but just where the
church stands it is shady and pleasant.
